Sanremo expanded: the Transmedia Transition of the Narrative Ecosystem of the 2023 Festival between Brand, Storytelling and Participatory Practices

Abstract

This essay we analyze the characteristics of the transmedia transition of a well-known event in the Italian cultural, social, and media scape: the Festival of Sanremo. Starting from the analysis of the 2023 edition, and contextualizing it within the contemporary media landscape, within the new convergent, social and transmedia television and within the current media system, we will observe some phenomena of hybridization with the storytelling of other media, like cinema and tv series, highlighting the transmedia turn of this medial event, which repositions it within the cultural consumption of Italians as a brand, which configures it as a narrative ecosystem with expansions and extensions, and which puts it at the center of some participatory practices by viewers. In this way, the new expanded Sanremo offers new and increasingly transmedia gateways to the television experience, and at the same time also to the world of popular music that it places on the screen.

Keywords

• television
• narrative ecosystems
• expanded tv
• sanremo
• transmediality